Richard Henderson

What I admire most about Henderson is how quietly he changed everything. There's no flashy persona here, no social media, no glamour, just an Edinburgh-born scientist who spent decades coaxing biological molecules into focus under an electron microscope. That patience earned him a share of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, but the prize feels almost incidental to the work itself. In an age obsessed with visibility, I find something deeply refreshing about a man who let his results speak and stayed invisible. He reshaped cryo-electron microscopy and let the field, not himself, take the spotlight.

Name (English)

Richard Henderson

Name (Japanese)

リチャード・ヘンダーソン

Reading

りちゃーど・へんだーそん

Born

July 19, 1945 (age 81)

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Cancer / Rooster

Origin

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Occupation

molecular biologist / biochemist / chemist / crystallographer / biologist

High school

Boroughmuir High School

University

University of Cambridge

Awards & achievements

• Fellow of the Royal Society
• 1990 Rosenstiel Award
• 1980 Ernst Ruska Prize
• 1978 William Bate Hardy Prize
• 2016 Alexander Hollaender Award in Biophysics
• 1984 Sir Hans Krebs Medal
• 1999 Gregori Aminoff Prize
• 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Motto

Private

• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%AA%E3%83%81%E3%83%A3%E3%83%BC%E3%83%89%E3%83%BB%E3%83%98%E3%83%B3%E3%83%80%E3%83%BC%E3%82%BD%E3%83%B3

Tags

• molecular biologist
• biochemist
• chemist

Last updated

2026-06-02

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.